David, you changed my life.
I haven’t said that to very many people in my life, but you without a doubt have saved mine and my familys financial future.
I saw your book (The Automatic Millionaire)sitting in my dads bookshelf two years ago when I ws 20. I read the back cover and then put it down again. I had read finacial books before and let’s just say they were more effective at putting me to sleep than a sleeping pill. A couple of months later the book was still sitting there, so I asked my dad about it. He said that it had changed his life, and he had been waiting for me to get to a point where I was ready to change mine before he gave it to me. I decided, what the heck, it couldn’t hurt. So I read it, and your advice was actually pretty interesting. Unfortunatly for me, I just didn’t want to change my spending habits. I figured that I was young enough that I could start later and just play a little catch up. Man, I kick myself for thinking like that.
Fast forward to two years later, I’m 22, I have no savings, no retirement fund, and I’m in debt up to my eyeballs. My boyfriend and I were earning almost 40 grand each a year, but we owed almost 20 grand in credit card debt, car payments, and personal loans. The icing on the cake was when we found out that we were expecting our first baby (SURPRISE!!). We sat down and talked about it, and we decided that if we were going to be parents, we needed to first be grown ups, so we made the decision to start taking our financial futures seriously. But it was all so overwhelming! We read books and talked to a financial planner, and nothing seemed to clear up for us what we really had to do to get ourselves into a good financial situation.
Then one day when we were cleaning out the second bedroom in our apartment to turn it into a babys room, and I came across your book. It seemed vaguely familiar to me, but I couldnt really remember it. So right there in the middle of a room filled with chaos, I sat down on the floor and started to read. Three hours later when my boyfriend found me, I was still sitting there, completely absorbed in your book. Suddenly it seemed that everything made sense! If I just followed your simple and easy to understand steps, we would be ok. As soon as I finished it, I made my boyfriend read it too.
Almost a year later, we have paid off two thirds of our debt, bought a townhouse, started a retirement fund, and are almost done filling our emergency fund!
I may have never met you in person, but you have touched my family’s life in a way that only a handful of other people have. Thank you for using your knowledge to help the nation.